the outdoor occupation of a
ranchman. Living on the wild game of the country, sleeping on the ground
by a camp-fire when his work required it, as much at home in the saddle
as by his ranch fireside, he was a romantic type of the strenuous
pioneer.

He was a man of simple tastes, true as tested steel in his friendships,
with a simple honest mind which followed truth and right as unerringly
as gravitation. In his domestic affairs, however, he was unfortunate.
The year after locating at Las Palomas, he had returned to his former
home on the Colorado River, where he had married Mary Bryan, also of the
family of Austin's colonists. Hopeful and happy they returned to their
new home on the Nueces, but before the first anniversary of their
wedding day arrived, she, with her first born, were laid in the same
grave. But grief does not kill, and the young husband bore his loss as
brave men do in living out their allotted day. But to the hour of his
death the memory of Mary Bryan mellowed him into a child, and, when
unoccupied, with every recurring thought of her or the mere mention of
her name, he would fall into deep reverie, lasting sometimes for hours.
And although he contracted two marriages afterward, they were simply
marriages of convenience, to which, after their termination, he
frequently referred flippantly, sometimes with irreverence, for they
were unhappy alliances.

On my arrival at Las Palomas, the only white woman on the ranch was
"Miss Jean," a spinster sister of its owner, and twenty years his
junior. After his third bitter experience in the lottery of matrimony,
evidently he gave up hope, and induced his sister to come out and
preside as the mistress of Las Palomas. She was not tall like her
brother, but rather plump for her forty years. She had large gray eyes,
with long black eyelashes, and she had a trick of looking out from under
them which was both provoking and disconcerting, and no doubt many an
admirer had been deceived by those same roguish, laughing eyes. Every
man, Mexican and child on the ranch was the devoted courtier of Miss
Jean, for she was a lovable woman; and in spite of her isolated life and
the constant plaguings of her brother on being a spinster, she fitted
neatly into our pastoral life. It was these teasings of her brother that
gave me my first inkling that the old ranchero was a wily matchmaker,
though he religiously denied every such accusation. With a remarkable
complacency, Jean Lovela